Potential Candidate for Idiocy of the Month?

“Heliographic Book News, California PRESS RELEASE 21 August 2005:

NEW BOOK OFFERS SCIENTIFIC LOOK AT LOVE

Why will Love be the most important "technology of the future" Why is a love-dominated world no longer an idealist's dream? This book offers the remarkable case based on Science...
A major new study of humanity’s favorite subject, Love, is now available: The Technology of Love by Charles E. Hansen. This book, the first of a two-volume project, is expected to send shock-waves throughout the reading community, both general and scholarly. Hansen, who began his study of Love while a doctoral student at George Washington University in the 1970s, offers the first formal ‘working definition’ of Love applicable to the entirety of daily living; and buttresses it with a breakthrough argument that Love is a scientific reality of our Universe that is here to stay.”

Allowing for the Publisher’s hype in the press release, the item came to my attention because it mentions Adam Smith and David Hume. I have not read the book and am loath to comment on its theme without reading the evidence; hence, I have not yet put this in the file as a provisional candidate for the Lost Legacy prize: “Idiocy of the Month”. Though to be frank, it does come from California … and it may be a plausible argument, but then does sound as if it could be tacky nonsense …

Read for yourself as The Press Release continues:

“The author offers remarkably penetrating interpretations of David Hume, Adam Smith, Sigmund Freud, and others, including Jesus, to make the case that the ingredients that ultimately form the experience of Love are the same fundamental ingredients of constructive social-economic interaction in general. Thus Love is not a cultural creation nor separable from the most basic understandings of our common humanity and our social constructions, beginning with the family. Furthermore, Hansen demonstrates that Love has scientific foundations in both physics and biology that will shock even the staunchest of socio-biologists, while at the same time showing clearly that the Love-fundamentals of Religion are of the same genre. Included is the boldest scientific sifting of Jesus’ teachings yet presented with a conclusion that Science and Religion are not as separate as most modern and post-modern thinkers have held. Yet this is not a ‘religious’ book.

Finally, and of considerable significance to readers religious or secular, Hansen offers the first scientific based definition of Justice as a derivative of Love, much as Hume suggested. Thus the question: What is Justice? that resides at the foundation of Western civilization, Hansen shows to have been ‘in error’: Plato’s (or Socrates?) question should have been What is Love? For it is only after defining Love that Justice can be fully understood.”

If anybody catches more on the book’s arguments, please post them here. I will watch Amazon for a second-hand copy.